The village of Plougastel-Daoulas in Brittany is sending out an appeal to linguists, cryptographers, students, scholars and puzzlers of all stripes to decipher a mysterious inscription carved onto a boulder centuries ago, and they’re willing to put money on it.

“This inscription is a mystery and it is for this that we are launching the appeal,” said Veronique Martin, who is spearheading the search for a code-cracker.

The rock, which is around the size of a person, is accessed via a path from the hamlet of Illien ar Gwenn just to the north of Corbeau point.

The inscription fills the entirety of one of its sides and is mainly in capital letters but there are also pictures including a sailing boat. There are two dates, 1786 and 1787.

“These dates correspond more or less to the years that various artillery batteries that protected Brest and notably Corbeau Fort which is right next to it,” she said.

The rock is bathed by the sea. The image of the sailboat is so close to the foot of the rock that the waters touch it at high tide.

The only known part of the inscription is a relatively recent addition: the date 1920, engraved by a Russian soldier garrisoned there during World War I. Just in case there might be a link between this and the rest of the inscription, linguists in Russia were contacted but to no avail. It’s not a Cyrillic language/dialect and Russian does not appear to have anything to do with it.

The Champollion Mystery of Plougastel-Daoulas, named after the French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion who translated the hieroglyphic inscription on the Rosetta Stone, runs through the end of November 2019. All submissions, analyses and research reports, will be analyzed by a jury of academics and a representative from Brittany’s archaeology department. The most plausible entry will receive a €2,000 award.

The municipality has already received more than a thousand emails. If you’d like to try your hand at solving this riddle, email veronique.martin@mairie-plougastel.fr .

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P.S.:Apart from all that, “An Alarc’h” (‘The Swan’) reports of the return from exile in England of the Breton prince Jean de Montfort (known as “The Swan of Montfort”) and his defeat of the French army under Bertrand du Guesclin in 1379.

Cf. Alan Stivell, À l’Olympia, 1972. The lyrics are unfortunately a bit bloodthirsty , but there are indeed really cool new words, and also not so new ones as well:

Perhaps it’s in a military shorthand, like the Roman milestones. Or maybe it’s another one of those coded military messages for pigeon post but the writer got somewhat carried away, unlike the message 😁

I’m a bit curious about how a Russian soldier came to be stationed in Brittany during WWI. I’m unaware of any such deployment. Was that garbled somehow and meant just after WWI? In 1920? There were enough refugees from the Russian revolution who ended up in France for that to seem plausible.

I don’t have the expertise or resources to decipher the inscription. However, various articles suggest a possible connection to late 18th century artillery batteries.

It occurred to me to follow that possibility it might be useful to know who served there, their geographic origins, language competencies, both their native tongues and those that they may have acquired during their lives. Do relevant military records exist?

They could gives clues as to which languages they could draw upon for clear or encoded texts.

Keep Paul Van Haver in mind (a.k.a. ‘maestro’, a.k.a ‘stromae’), and the practice of “Verlan”, where words are formed by switching the order in which syllables from the original word are pronounced. For example, ‘français’ becomes ‘céfran’.

Some ‘verlan’ words, such as meuf, have become so commonplace that they were adopted in the ‘Petit Larousse’ and a doubly “verlanised” version was deemed necessary, so the singly verlanised meuf became feumeu; similarly, the verlan word beur, derived from arabe, has become accepted into popular culture such that it has been re-verlanised to yield “rebeu”

Back then, however, 18th century French prison slang was probably even worse:

Apparently, between April and July in 1787 inmates died, some Spaniards -and other outcasts- had been doing something for 5 months, and Alvarez, Oscar Cloiver and others were “REZE”, and later in 1786 something happened (presumably, the text in question was chiselled).